Portable Model
I made a music magazine with a bunch of cool people. It's called portable model. You can buy it now.
It's hard to explain what makes a person want to punish themself into print media, but it happened to me. I've made zines for a long time and I've always bristled against being a writer or a music writer or whatever, but I love making things. I love holding it in my hand. I love working on writing with other people. I don't really care about anything, I just wanna make cool stuff.
Portable Model is a music magazine I've been working on creating for most of this year, but really since I approached the first potential contributor about it back in September of 2023.
This inaugural issue of Portable Model is themed around the topic of tangibility for no reason other than the guiding principle that if I’m going to make something, it’s going to be full of stuff I want to read. As you all know, I’m more of an essayist (on a good day) or a general blogger (on a usual day) moonlighting as a music writer. As a reader, I used to think I liked personal skews in music writing as a general rule. Now I see it more clearly. It is not inherently interesting to talk about what you think– what you think sucks, what you think is good, what you think is overrated, what you love to hate. Your personal perspective there is useless, unless you can make me laugh. This is, of course, why people sound ridiculous when they say reviews should just say “It Rips” or whatever.
Matters of personal taste and what you or I might think our tastes say about us is just not inherently of any interest. The personal is only good– can even be great– when it takes your opinion and experience into the realm of something rich and real and beautiful. The personal is only good when it’s something you can feel. It’s a deceptively difficult thing to achieve, but when you get there– when you really find a way into something real or felt or beautiful or ugly or at the core of your day to day– well that’s special.
For the issue, I got a bunch of people to talk about the ways music lives in their lives or in all of our lives or both. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
Inside you’ll find 116 pages of photos, essays, reported features, crossword puzzles (okay, just one crossword), illustrations and more! You can check out the table of contents and some pulls from the magazine below.
Featured writers include:
Mia Hughes, Eli Enis, Hugo Reyes, Jay Papandreas, Evan Minsker, Arielle Gordon, Ethan Beck, Krista Brown, Jami Nakamura Lin, Miranda Reinert, Mike LeSuer, Eric Bennett, Grace Robins-Somerville, Devon Chodzin, Sam Goblin, Zainab Athumani, Niccolo Porcello, Rob Moura, Brendan Menapace, Andreas Loretan of Possessed Fanzine, Jordy Walsh, Madeline Carpou, and Ben Loftus.
With photos from James Palko, Morgan Kelley, and more.
Special thanks to James, Devon, Jay and Mia for trusting me to give you assignments without any real depth of information. Thanks to Corrin for letting me co-opt our other thing for this project. Thanks to Michael, Eric and Eli for always taking me seriously. Deciding to make something like this does not make me special, but I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to get to do everything I do around all of you.
Thanks to all of you, as always. Listen to Joan of Arc and make something cool just because you want to.
You can purchase issue 1 here:
Shop
We're doing a short pre-order. Domestic shipping will be free through the end of the preorder which will end... in a few days. Thanks!
Miranda Reinert is a music adjacent writer, zine maker, podcaster and law school drop out based in Chicago. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram for more reminiscing on the year: @mirandareinert. This blog does have a paid option and I would so appreciate any money you would be willing to throw me! You may also send me small bits of money at @miranda-reinert on venmo/on Paypal if you want. As always, thanks for reading!
Comments ()